Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪

Send us Fan Mail 📑 A list of EOY Tasks to set you up for sales in 2024 Hopefully you've survived the holidays and with NYE being a more muted cookie holiday, you get a chance to breathe, meet your kids you've not seen in 6 months because you've been sequestered in the kitchen, and take a little time to binge some good ol' Netflix.  During this lull of a week in between 2023 an...

Send us Fan Mail 💚 Burnout Boundary - How to ward off the Spirit of Grinch-Mas. 'Tis the season to h-h-hate your bakery business. I can't even judge, I'm a slave to the "cookie SuperBowl" where we sell the MOST volume all year x10 (see the diagram from Google search queries for "Sugar Cookies" below). 🔥 It's our time to shine - shine - shine, baby, and the...

Send us Fan Mail 🏫 The Cookie Class Kits Explained and how you can get all 13 kits for $4.84 each Okay yeah - Heather here. I made a calendar boo-boo and thought I'd be in town on Monday, but turned out, I'll be outta town, so I had to record the "Tuesday Podcast" for the "Onesday Wednesday Newsletter" on Sunday - so, 👋 hello from the past.  Since I had to podcast a...

Send us Fan Mail 🙊 Vendy Blendy Marketing-endy and what you can learn from our blendy blunders. We may not be allowed to talk about "the event that shall not be named," but that doesn't mean we can't learn from it! A lot of marketing goes into the yearly Vendy Blendy, and it seems like each year we learn a little more from both the Vendys and the Pendys (turned Spendys).  So l...

Send us Fan Mail 🎁 Best Baker Gifts 2023 (feel free to forward this email)  🎅🏻 Corrie had a genius idea (they come around to her once a decade) to ask bakers what they think other bakers would want should they find their names scrawled on Santa's nice list this year. 📜 Ho-Ho-Hold your credit cards, because some of these are really creative! We've come up with an "actually afford...

Send us Fan Mail 🤑What if I Gave You A Million Dollars... Would you do it? 🤔 "Do what? But also - yes," you might ask - and that's exactly the point of this week's podcast. If you knew you were going to get a million dollars for taking a benign action, most of us wouldn't think twice before we did it. Full confession - 👕 I was cleaning out my closet, 👖 donating what I...

Send us Fan Mail 😵‍💫 Surviving Q4 - the fight for the newsfeed It's the time of yeeeear... when the reach is low and the engagement is even lower. What gives?! I'll tell ya what - the deep pockets of big corporations capitalizing on the "year-end consumer" who is primed to pay.  It's a fight to the feed death in Q4, and we've got some tips and tricks to help you gai...

Send us Fan Mail ⤴️ The Last Rule Bender - bending the rules for the bottom line You know we preach policies. 👏 Protect your boundaries. 👏 Charge your worth. 👏 Guard your peace. But you may be surprised to know we also say "bend the rules." You see - the policies are the "big bad monsters" we use as our fall guy.  🤷‍♀ "I'm sorry - my policies state no refunds for...

Send us Fan Mail 🍰 Audit of a Cake Class and the lessons we're implementing. Corrie and my mom and sisters all met up on Sunday for a cake class - they had a blast, but they also got to be on the "student" side of a class for once (Corrie specifically). So she made some notes she could take back to our own class drawing board. Here's her "bake down" of her mental not...

Send us Fan Mail 🍓Vendy Blendy Berry (and how to squeeze the most from it) It’s that tiiiime of year… 😍 when the cookie world falls in love with some STELLAR deals. It's the third-ever Vendy Blendy! (👀 oh and how to win one of two Bambu Baby Carbon X1C 3D printers?! More on that in a minute.) Get into the holiday spirit by treatin’ YOSELF to some cookie cutters, stencils, tees, and icing t...

Send us Fan Mail 💼 Corporate Girly Era Corrie was on a mission this year to enter her ✨corporate girly era✨ - 👨‍💼 a time in her life (and business) where she gets most of her leads from small to medium-sized businesses (and heck - at this point, international businesses).  Why? 🧦 Because corporate clients rock baker's socks - that's why. Here's the magic of corporate orders:...

Send us Fan Mail 1️⃣ The One Percenters As admins of a group of niche cottage home bakers, we get to see a lot of questions about getting sales - and even more people thinking they can compete on price to gain traction in the marketplace.  But competing on price is a literal race to the bottom - the bottom of your bank account. Ya see, if I lower my price by $1, and you lower yours by $2, and then...

Send us Fan Mail 🦉 Consistent Crows Ruth Ann (twin grandmother - my middle name is Ruth, Corrie's is Ann... you see what they did there, don't ya?) has a habit of being consistent. Not just any type of consistency - she's radically consistent. I mean - you could set the atomic clock to her ability to wake up at 6AM on the nose.  So - last year, 🦉🦉🦉🦉🦉 (I know, these are owls -...

Send us Fan Mail 🩹 Make Mistakes. I watched (see: was addicted to) a TikTok the other day where an insanely successful older man was interviewed on a podcast. 🤔 The interviewer said, "How did you know it was time to expand your business? Which metric were you tracking that helped you make the jump into expansion?"  🧐 "Metric? We weren't following a metric. I knew we needed t...

Send us Fan Mail 🍿 How Ya Get 'em is How Ya Keep 'em Things we want when we market: 🤩 High engagement! 🤩 Exponential growth! 🤩 Reach as wide as the Atlantic - heck the Pacific!  🤩 Big Numbers! 🤩 Lots of Likes!  🤩 All the money in the WORLD !  But what don't we want? All the above if you went about getting it the wrong way. Such is the topic of this week's Baking it Down...

Send us Fan Mail 💃 The Pricing Dance When's the perfect time to introduce price into the "cookie conversation"? Is it message one, 👋 "Hello, my name is $68 dollars a dozen?" Or is it after 50 messages when you've spent days (maybe even a week?) mocking up, designing, ordering cutters, and checking gel colors you've got, only for the client to turn "tire ki...

Send us Fan Mail 💣 The Nuclear Option 💵 Put ya money where ya goals are. Here's all you need to know about this week's podcast: PayPal: hello@sugarcookiemarketing.com 💥 Okay - a lil' more context before you send me your life's savings.  I really like David from the Raptitude Blog - and one of his more recent emails talked about "atomic accountability" in the form o...

Send us Fan Mail  🗣️ Narcissistic Conversations - how chatty cathy is costing you cash Okay - this isn't exactly what you think - I mean, we're not talkin' about your Narc ex. That's between you and a therapist. BUT we are talking about narcissistic conversationalists - of which many of us at times have been guilty. 🤑 And it's costing you cash.  The term, coined by Charle...

Send us Fan Mail 🛒 The Vendy de Blendy Is Open for Vendor Registration And we need your help - to bug the shops you wanna see Vendying the most!  Okay - before I tell ya the who-what-where-when-why of the Vendy Blendy, lemme tell ya why we're talking about the un-talk-about-able. 🧠 We thought finally taking our own advice and working ahead this year would let us have a longer run-time promo...

Send us Fan Mail 🧠 T-O-M-A 🧠 🍅 Thought I typoed " tomato " didn't ya? I wouldn't put it past me at this point. But alas - no. It's an acronym this time. "What other weird acronym are the twins talkin' about today?!" 🗣️ Yeah - agreed, but this marketing jargon may make you sales without selling!  ⬆️🧠 T-O-M-A: Top of Mind Awareness.  Think of "TOMA&qu...

Send us Fan Mail 🪙 The Gold Ratio 🪙 I know some of you are screaming at your computer screen right now sayin' "IT'S GOLD EN RATIO!" But hold up, now ya hear! It's a play on words (but trust that 99.9% of other times it's a typo - but this time it isn't... surprisingly).  In marketing, it's easy to fall prey to numbers. Numerical evaluations are THROWN at u...

Send us Fan Mail 💲 Asset Assumption 💲 "A $$ uming makes a butt outta you and me" - words have been changed to protect the innocent, but the stance stands true. Assuming client expectations rather than communicating them steals your business a$$ets and leaves you with an empty bank account and an angry customer.  But I get it - communication is hard, we're busy, the clients are vag...

Send us Fan Mail ✌️ Good. Fast. Cheap ✌️ Choose Two. Heather - still carless - has been bumming rides, but "get a pre-purchase inspection" isn't the only lesson learned here. Her derelict car had the option to go to a shop up north or another shop down south - both highly recommended. 😍 Heather : "Hey [mechanic]! Was wondering if I could get my car shipped to ya! You come high...

Send us Fan Mail 🛒 Primed for Prime Day 🛒 🛍️ We may not be Bezos Billionaires, but we can learn a thing or two from the e-comm king. Jeffy has us in a headlock with his annual Prime Day Deals - and as we sit here refreshing the feed to lightning deals, 🕯 the twins wax old on both how to melt candle wax and how to implement some of the FOMO magic into our cookie businesses. 💳 Nine Ways to Prime...

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